ability to order company services and track status via integration with external CRM

Solution

We decided to use Sharepoint 2007 CMS as the base platform for the development of the customer’s portal. The benefits of using proprietary CMS software rather than developing a custom web-solution, is that Sharepoint 2007 already has many out-of-the-box features. This matches the customer’s needs and is simultaneously fully customizable. E.g. the collaboration center was implemented via customized site templates based on OTB templates. Workflow support was easily accomplished via standard Approval Workflow and several custom designed workflows implemented via the Windows Workflow Foundation.

Business process management was specified and implemented based on Sharepoint custom content types. The extranet part of the portal was configured via MOSS administration tools. Advanced search, security engine, documents versioning – all of these being customer goals achieved via the OTB features embedded as part of our customization. This allowed covering a customer investment in proprietary CMS software and making the development work to be completed much faster than developing a custom web-solution.